I love it, I will keep using Twitter. My problem is that I had had a follow-read-retweet pattern of usage for ~4 years and then 3 mos ago I snapped and started replying to others as well. My interest in the platform went from reddit replacement to a way to try to prove out my own opinions. My reliance on the platform, already high, skyrocketed

About a month later I hit the 5k follow limit. The established method to clear this hurdle is to become “famous” enough for Twitter to lift the cap

Four weeks after hitting the limit, I was frustrated enough to do the scratch maths and found that if I had had a 5k + 100 per month of use where I had sent 100+ retweets I would be fine which seems a simple fix conceptually

I get frustrated because when I have a nice conversation these days I have to go back and find people I had followed ~8 years ago and drop them in favor of someone I just met

I want to understand why this is happening in terms of incentives. I can only assume there aren't a lot of people trying to use the platform this way (unlikely), that Twitter doesn’t staff economists who would know about inflation (unlikely), or that Twitter feels the follow-celebrities concept of their early days is still the best way to sell ads

I know there are tech challenges on the backend and that Twitter is massive, but that seems subordinate to the idea that listening to more people than listen to you is a eu-social behavior

St Francis of Assisi famously prayed “Make me a channel of your peace... O master grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand”

Maybe if Twitter’s excess of revenues over expenses were all swept to the US Treasury less reinvestment rather than used to distribute to shareholders or buy back stock they could focus on promotion of eu-social behavior rather than eyeball/clickthrough optimization?

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-follow-limit